Real Life Dexter: I Only Murder ‘Bad People’

Miranda Barbour, the nineteen-year-old Craigslist killer who confessed to the murder of Troy LaFerrara as well as possibly dozens of others, spoke out this past Friday in a jail phone interview, saying that she felt no remorse for the people she had killed. This real life Dexter claimed to only murder ‘bad people,’ and that LaFerrara matched that description.

Many avid TV watchers are fans of Dexter, a show about a serial killer who has the urge to kill and quenches that thirst carefully by only allowing himself to murder other murderers. He stalks them, studying their habits and finding the best way to get them alone to kill them and to prevent them from hurting anyone else. The TV show has viewers sympathizing with Dexter, hoping that he will get away with it and keep his murderous secret from the very police department he works for.

The public response to Barbour’s string of murders has been a bit different. While she seems to share some traits in common with the fictional Dexter, such as luring people in, becoming their friends, studying them and learning about their habits before killing them, her line that makes a person a candidate for murder seems to be a lot looser, as exemplified by the November 2013 stabbing of LaFerrara in Sunbury, Pennsylvania. On the night of the 11th, this real life Dexter put LaFerrara on her ‘bad people’ list and scheduled him for murder.

In her interview Friday, Barbour spoke about how she and her husband Elytte Barbour, who had been married for three weeks at that point, lured LaFerrara out to a mall parking lot in Hummels Wharf with the promise of sex for cash. After driving six more miles to Sunbury in Barbour’s Honda CRV with her husband Elytte lying in the back seat of the car, she pulled over. Barbour then said that LaFerrara tried to grope her, but that she protested, lying and telling him that she was only 16. When LaFerrara said that he did not mind, things became violent. Elytte shot up from the backseat and flung a cord around LaFerrara’s neck, which was part of the plan. What was not part of the plan was Barbour stabbing him with a knife 20 times. Barbour claimed that it was LaFerrara’s words that set her off, and that if he had refused to have sex with her because she was too young, then she would have allowed him to get out of the car, alive and well.

Like Dexter, Barbour also had a traumatic childhood. While she wasn’t found in a pool of her dead mother’s blood as Dexter was, Barbour was sexually molested by a relative at the age of 4, and claimed to have joined an Alaskan satanic cult at 13, having her first shot at murder only a few months later. Barbour said that the cult leader took her into an alley where he was meeting with a man who owed him money. The leader then shot the man and put the gun into Barbour’s hands, forcing her to pull the trigger as well. From there on, Barbour said she just kept killing.

Barbour says that her reason for stating the blank truth and confessing to all these murders is because she knows that she will be eligible for release in 20 years and does not want to be able to get out of prison. She says that if released, she will simply continue to kill, much like Dexter, who does not feel he has a choice when it comes to murder. In real life, however, this killer who may be similar to the fan favorite Dexter will murder anyone who fits only her personal description of ‘bad people,’ and that description may be one that not many people agree deserves death.